met on the asphalt road to the town he was subdued; the humiliation of his sacking and the worry showed on his face. He was defiant, though. He said, “I don't know who the hell these people think they are, Willie. It's all going up in smoke. They are going to Lisbon and Paris and London and talking about their children's education. They are living in a fool's paradise.” I thought he was copying the apocalyptic tone of his late master. But he had real news. He said, “The guerrillas are in camps just over the border. The government there is on their side. They are real guerrillas now, and they aren't playing. When they decide to move I don't see what's going to stop them.”
For some weeks there had been fewer soldiers in the town, and there had been talk about army manoeuvres deep in the bush to the north and the west. There was little in the newspapers. It was only later, some time after Álvaro had given me the news, that announcements were made of the successful army “sweep” to the north and west, right up to the border. The army began then to come back to the town; and things were as before. The places of pleasure were busy again. But by this time I had lost touch with Álvaro.
I had found less and less pleasure in the places of pleasure. Some of this would have had to do with my worry about seeing Júlio's daughter again. But the main reason was that the act of sex there, which used to excite me with its directness and brutality, had grown mechanical. For the first year I used to keep a tally, in my head, of the times I had been; again and again I would do the sums, associating outside events, lunches, visits, with these darker, brighter moments in the warm cubicles, creating as it were a special calendar of that year for myself. Gradually, then, it happened that I went not out of need but in order to add to the tally. At an even later stage I went just to test my capacity. Sometimes on those occasions I had to drive myself; I wished then not to extend the moment but to finish as soon as possible. The girls were always willing, always ready to demonstrate the tricks of strength and suppleness that had sent me away the first time with new sensations, a new idea of myself, and tenderness for everyone and everything. Now the sensation was of exhaustion and waste, of my lower stomach scraped dry; I needed a day or two to recover. It was in this enervated mood that I began to make love to Ana again, hoping to recover the closeness that had once seemed so natural. It couldn't be. That old closeness was not based on love-making, and now, not even rebuking me for my long absence, she was as timorous as I remembered. I gave her little pleasure; I gave myself none at all. So I was more restless and dissatisfied than I had been before Álvaro said to me in the café in the town, “Would you like to see what they do?” Before I had been introduced to a kind of sensual life I didn't know I was missing.
*
CARLA ANNOUNCED that she was going to move to Portugal for good as soon as she found a new manager. The news cast a gloom over us, people of Carla's estate-house group, and we tried over the next few weeks to get her to change her mind, not because we were thinking of her, but because—as often after a death—we were thinking of ourselves. We were jealous and worried. Carla's going away, the disappearance of the Correias, felt like the beginning of the breakdown of our special world. It touched new fears we didn't want to think about; it lessened our idea of the life we were leading. Even Ana, never envious of anyone, said with something like spite, “Carla says she's leaving because she can't bear to be alone in the house, but I happen to know that she's only doing what Jacinto told her to do.”
Soon enough the new manager was found. He was the husband of a convent-school friend of Carla's; and the story spread by Carla to win sympathy for the couple, was that life had not treated them well. They were not going to live in the manager's house; Álvaro and his